Why Walter Bender Left One Laptop Per Child

STEVE LOHR

Tuesday

May 27, 2008 at 12:01 AMMay 28, 2008 at 4:51 AM

Mr. Bender’s departure had been the subject of blog posts that suggested his exit was because a pact with Microsoft was in the works.

When Microsoft joined the One Laptop Per Child project earlier this month, I wrote an article noting the change in heart by both sides. The O.L.P.C. project, intended to bring cheap computers to children in poorer nations, had been committed to using the freely distributed Linux operating system, an open-source alternative to Microsoft's Windows. And Microsoft had resisted joining anything that promoted open-source software.

Walter Bender, a longtime collaborator of Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the nonprofit laptop group, left O.L.P.C. in April. Mr. Bender oversaw software development for the project. His departure had been the subject of blog posts that suggested his exit was because a pact with Microsoft was in the works.

When I wrote the news article, I sent Mr. Bender an e-mail, asking him why he left. He replied that he decided his efforts to advance the cause of open-source learning software “would have more impact from outside of O.L.P.C. than from within.”

I also asked Mr. Negroponte about Mr. Bender’s departure, and he called it “a huge loss.” Mr. Negroponte said that, in his view, some people had come to see open-source software as an end of the project instead of a means. “I think some people, including Walter, became much too fundamental about open source,” he said.

After the article was published May 16, Mr. Bender sent a letter to the Times, taking issue with Mr. Negroponte’s comment and elaborating on his own views: "Mr. Negroponte is wrong when he asserts that I am a free and open-source (FOSS) fundamentalist. I am a learning fundamentalist."

I talked to Mr. Bender last Friday to discuss his views at more length and give them a broader airing.

“Microsoft stepping in is the symptom, not the disease,” he said in the interview. The issue, in his view, is whether the tools that bring computing to children are “agnostic on learning” or “take a position on learning.”

“O.L.P.C. has become implicitly agnostic about learning,” he said. The project’s focus, he said, is on bringing low-cost laptop computers to children around the world. "It's a great goal, but it’s not my goal,” he said.

Mr. Bender is a founder of Sugar Labs, a new organization whose goal is to continue developing and promoting the use of Sugar open-source education software.

The Sugar software, which provides the user interface for O.L.P.C. laptops, is the means toward the end of a “constructionist learning model,” said Mr. Bender. It’s an approach that builds on the conceptual work of Jean Piaget, the Swiss philosopher and developmental theorist, and the practical research of his intellectual descendants like Seymour Papert, the M.I.T. computer scientist, educator and inventor of the Logo programming language, designed for education.

The constructionist model, put simply, says people learn best by building things -- solving problems by “constructing” answers as active agents -- instead of by being passive recipients of facts and received knowledge.

Computing is potentially an ideal tool for constructionist education because a computer is a universal machine and software is a building material without material constraints. (In fairness, Mr. Negroponte, founder of the M.I.T. Media Lab, has also been a champion of the constructionist education agenda over the years.)

Mr. Bender said he thinks the collaborative, interactive learning environment embodied by Sugar could be “a game changer in how technology and education collide.” He says he wants to see the Sugar software run on many different kinds of hardware and software platforms, even on Windows, if the Sugar experience is not sacrificed.

“It’s not about Microsoft being evil,” Mr. Bender said. “It’s about optimizing the chance of having a positive impact on education, and that is what Sugar is about. And that mission would be endangered by being too tightly coupled to one hardware vendor, O.L.P.C.”

O.L.P.C. says that Sugar will continue to be offered on its machines, and the project has announced it plans to work with outside developers to port the software to Windows. “I’m not sure what that means,” Mr. Bender said. “I can’t do it, and I’m not going to work on it.”

However, Mr. Bender said that in the last two weeks, he has talked to four laptop manufacturers he won't name, including major PC makers, about making Sugar-based machines -- with no Windows in the recipe.

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